Part 4 (1/2)

The nurse told me the next day that after I had gone the boys went quietly to bed; that there was little tossing that night and no walking the floors, as there had been before. A doctor friend said to me: ”After all, maybe your medicine is best, for while we are more or less groping in the dark as to our treatment of sh.e.l.l-shock, we do know that the only cure will be that something comes into their souls to give them quiet of mind and peace within.”

”I know what that medicine is,” I told him. ”I have seen it work.”

”What is it?” he asked.

Then I told him of my experience.

”You may be right.”

And so it is all over France; where I have worked in some twenty hospitals--from the first-aid dressing-stations back through the evacuation hospitals to the base hospitals--and have found that the reaction of our boys to wounds and suffering is always a spiritual reaction. I know as I know no other thing, that the boys of America are to come back, wounded or otherwise, a better crowd of men than they went away. They are men reborn, and when they come back, when it's ”over, over there,” there is to be a nation reborn because of the leaven that is within their souls.

V

SILHOUETTES OF SACRILEGE

During the last year there has come into French art a new era of the silhouette. In every art store in Paris one sees wonderful silhouettes which tell the story of the horror of the Hun better than any words can paint it, and when one attempts to paint it he must attempt it in word silhouettes.

The silhouette catches the picture better than color. Gaunt, naked, ruined cathedrals, homes, towers, and forests are better pictured in black silhouettes than any other way. There is nothing much left in some places in France but silhouettes.

Those who have seen Rheims know that the best reproduction of its ruins has been conveyed by the simple silhouette of the artist. There it stands outlined against the sky. Rheims that was once the wonder of the world is now naked ruins, tottering walls, with its towers still standing, looming against the sky like tottering trees. And when, during the past year, the walls fell, they:

”Left a lonesome place against the sky”

of all the world.

The church at Albert was like that. Only a silhouette can describe or picture it. There it stood against the sky by day and night, with the figure on its top leaning. The old legend of the soldiers that when the figure of the Virgin fell to the earth the war would end has been dissipated, for during the last drive that figure fell, and the tower with it. But forever (although it has fallen to dust and debris, because of descriptions we have seen of it) it shall stand out in our memories like a lonely, toppling tree against a crimson sunset!

Every day on the Toul line we used to drive through a village that had been sh.e.l.led until it was in ruins. Only the tower and the walls of a beautiful little church remained. Every other house in the village was razed to the ground. Nothing else remained.

There it stands to this day, for when I saw it last in June it was still standing as it was in January. Every evening about sunset we used to drive down that way, taking supplies to the front-line huts.

Many things stand out in one's memory of a certain road over which he drives night after night and day after day. There is the cross at the forks of the roads. There is the old monastery, battered and in ruins, that stood out like a gaunt ghost of the vandal Hun. There was the little G.o.d's acre along the road which we pa.s.sed every day. There were always the observation-balloons against the evening sky. There were always the fleet-winged birds of the air outlined against the evening.

There were always the marching men and the ambulance trains. But standing out above them all, etched with the acid of regret and anger and horror, stood that lonely tower. Night after night we approached it with a beautiful sunset off to the west where the Germans lay buried in their trenches. Coming back from the German lines we would see this church-tower outlined against the crimson sky like a finger pointing G.o.d-ward, and declaring to all the world that the G.o.d above would avenge this silent, accusing Silhouette of Sacrilege.

There has been a good deal of discussion over a certain book ent.i.tled ”I Accuse.” I never saw that finger pointing into the sky as we drove through this village that it did not cry out to the heavens and across the short miles to the German Huns, looking down, as it did, at its feet where the ruined homes lay, the village that it had mothered and fathered, the village that had wors.h.i.+pped within its simple walls, the village that had brought its joys and sorrows there, the village that had buried the dead within its shadows, the village that had brought its young there to be married and its aged to be buried; there it stood, night after night, against the crimson sky sometimes, against the golden sky at other times; against the rose, against the blue, against the purple sunsets; and ever it thundered: ”I accuse! I accuse! I accuse!”

Then there is that Silhouette of Sacrilege up on the Baupaume Road.

This is called ”the saddest road in Christendom,” because more men have been killed along its scarred pathway than along any other road in all the world. Not even the road to Calvary was as sad as this road.

Along this road when the French held it, during the first year of the war, they gathered their dead together and buried them in a little cemetery. Above the sacred remains of their comrades these French soldiers erected a simple bronze cross as a symbol not only of the faith of the nation, but a symbol also of the cause in which they had died.

A few months later when the Germans had recaptured this spot, and it had been fought over, and the bronze cross still stood, the Hun, too, gathered his dead together and buried them side by side with the French. Then he did a characteristic thing. He got a large stone as a base and mounted a cannon-ball on top of this stone, and left it there, side by side with the French cross.

Whether he meant it or not, his sacrilege stands as a fitting expression of his philosophy, the philosophy of the brute, the religion of the granite rock and the iron cannon-ball.

He told his own story here. Side by side in those two monuments the contrast is made, the causes are placed. One is the cause of the cross, the cause of men willing to die for brotherhood; the other is the cause of those who are willing to kill to conquer.